MISS HOLLIDAY ON THE LINE

Written by Gilbert Millstein
(From the New York Times November 25, 1956)

The following intelligences concerning Miss Judy Holliday, tiny as the driving rods on an O-gauge locomotive, but precious as ambergris, were scooped up at breakneck pace between the dressing rooms of the Shubert Theatre and the banquettes of a restaurant a couple of blocks away, and will be passed along with circumlocution:

When "Bells Are Ringing," a musical comedy about a telephone-answering service, by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (book and lyrics) and Jule Styne (music), opens Thursday on Broadway, it will mark the first time Miss Holliday has ever sung for a paying Broadway audience; the first time she has appeared before one since Dec. 31, 1949, when "Born Yesterday" closed (with the exception of a City Center revival of "Dream Girl," which will not be permitted to count); and the first time she has teamed up professionally with Miss Comden and Mr. Green since the three of them were three-fifths of a determinedly avante-garde night-club troupe called The Revuers, which clotted up in Greenwich Village in 1938 and dissolved in Hollywood in the early Forties.

Major Discovery

     About three years ago, Miss Holliday said she discovered while making "The Marrying Kind" in Hollywood, that she wanted to be an actress. She delivered the lines without a trace of archness. "I never admitted it before," she went on. "I'd been fighting it for years. My director, George Cukor, had a lot to do with it. He'd tell me I was an actress. I'd tell him he was a liar. He knocked a lot of nonsense out of me. I started enjoying acting. He grew me up." At this point, more or less simultaneously, Holliday, Comden and Green took up the thread. All that kept them apart, in a business way, since the days of The Revuers had been other business. "It's really loathsome, were so attached to each other," observed Miss Holliday fondly. "But we could only write for M-G-M and she could only act for Harry Cohn" said Miss Comden. (Harry Cohn is the President of Columbia Pictures.)

     The proper juxtaposition of time, space and propinquity was achieved, Green said, in June, 1955, when all three happened to be in New York, Comden and Green on the East Side, Miss Holliday on the West Side. Miss Holliday was resting between her films ["Phffft!"] and "The Solid Gold Cadillac." Comden and Green, restless and fruitful, had an idea (telephone-answering-service girl fixes lives, finds romance behind switchboard), no score, no composer and two sketchy scenes of a rough first draft, which they read to Miss Holliday, generating tremendous excitement all around.

     Last May, still scoreless, but in possession of a full first draft, the librettists and star met in Hollywood and pledged themselves, rather embarrassedly, to undying collaboration. "This was the first time in years that we'd any professional contact and we simply couldn't make any contact, professional or otherwise, for about a week," said Miss Comden. "Suddenly the old familiar faces were masks," said Miss Holliday, "masks of embarrassment." Everybody was afraid of hurting everybody else's feelings. "We all broke the sound barrier eventually," said Green. This was achieved in an interesting way. At the time, Miss Holliday was filming a picture called "Full of Life," as yet unreleased, in which she plays an expectant mother. The only chance she had to audition leading men was during her lunch hours, when she showed up---expectantly---in full costume, thus provoking general hilarity and relaxing everybody. She was still professionally pregnant when Sydney Chaplin was signed. Subsequently, Composer Jule Style was acquired.

Trained To Sing

It was blandly assumed by everybody except Miss Holliday that she would sing. "Nobody knew whether I could," she said, but they kept saying it. It takes an act of faith to say it with such ferocity and conviction. "Singing was like I suddenly got a toupee or a new nose." Green nodded. "If you have any ingrained sense of satire and self-ridicule," he said, "it gives you to think before you sing professionally and it takes a lot of gorge-swallowing." Miss Holliday swallowed compulsively, studied for two months under Herbert Greene, who did the vocal arrangements for the show and ultimately moved Jule Styne to say, "I hope you wont be angry, but your singing is as good as your acting." This piece of information was supplied by Green. Miss Holliday noted that her confidence was at such a low ebb in the early stages that she insisted on singing for one person at a time and then only while standing in a corner with her back to the auditor. The day she turned around she was characterized as a "cataclysmic."

Miss Holliday, a girl with a big frame, who has to watch her weight, polished off a rare hamburger and half a potato pancake, and wound up things with a few addenda. When she opened in New Haven (with a torn shoulder tendon, bursitis in both shoulders and an arm in a sling), her 4 year-old son, Jonathan, was taken backstage, where he promptly scolded Comden and Green. "That's enough," he said, "Mommy'll be too tired for me." She was, she said, "afraid to come back to Broadway until this. 'Born Yesterday' was pretty high tension, a hell of a triumph for an actress. I had to top it and up to now there was nothing to top it with."